This doll deserved so much better than the factory gave her, and she was one of the casualties of being an early review where I wasn't yet doing justice to all of my dolls. Headmistress Bloodgood was overdue for a revisit, and the actual completion of the revisit was also overdue--it began in 2025 and stalled out!
I was driven to do more work on this doll because I was always frustrated with how very poorly-equipped she was to execute her gimmick. You design a doll who's meant to be an iconic headless rider, and yet she can barely even carry her head two-handed? For shame. It was my main gripe with the doll when I reviewed her in 2023. Her elbow and wrist hinges were too weak in all aspects of articulation for her to be able to hold a pose with her head in hand. I needed to fix that. This doll, in factory condition, was only easy to display on the shelf while put together, and that totally misses the point.
To tighten Monster High joints, you can use superglue worked slowly into the hinges so it cures slowly while reducing the space inside the joint. Don't move the joint frequently enough and it'll get glued solid in one position, while being floppy in other points of the motion. It's a little tricky and requires patience, but I got it done. Skullector Shorty also marked my first time putting glue on the pegs to tighten the rotation aspect of a joint, which was something Bloodgood still needed after my first pass at modifications in 2025. I got that done when Shorty's photo ideas pushed me to finish work on Bloodgood. I needed her silhouette for Shorty's shadow-puppet gag!
Meanwhile, I was also very frustrated by the cut of her coat being so high that it didn't cover the line of her waist and showed some white from the shirt. It's a messy doll coat, but I added elastic suspenders to her pants so I could tuck her shirt in and keep her pants pulled high. I also added fabric glue to the white ruffles to stop the ongoing fraying, and trimmed the edge of the hook velcro on her coat which was poking out.
I also decided to paint her neck knob white to make it look more like bone. Extracting it broke her torso's neck segment, so I had to glue the front back on and sand and paint it as best I could to hide the damage. I painted the hollow inside with lightly gory red acrylic, and to change the neck peg color, I used spray sealant and watercolor pencil in layers since acrylic paint would chip off. Bloodgood deserves a good spooky display with her head off rather than the peg looking so utilitarian. The Headmistress is already pushing it for the girls' toy market and I know why they didn't make her creepier, but if adult-collector Corazón Marikit can have a spine connecting her body halves, Bloodgood's neck peg can be white.
I also repainted her irises grey to match her original webisode design better. Her eyes changed to blue for the doll, which didn't feel necessary to me.
Here's the suspenders and the modified/repaired neck joint. I'm pleased that Bloodgood is still able to wear her head after this. She hasn't rubbed the paint off the peg or broken the neck off her torso when popping the head on and off (carefully) after these interventions.
The repaint, some joint tightening, and the suspenders and neck adjustments were all 2025 mods. Just recently, I came back for another round of joint tightening...and I also had to figure out how to make Bloodgood actually hold her head.
See, the doll head is not really designed to be held, which is another of the doll's issues. It's just a standard Mattel doll head design, and even with tighter joints, the shape of the head is not such that it can easily be held aloft from below by a hand. It's doable:
 |
| Photo taken after round 1 of modifications. |
But it's far too delicate to finally get the head in that kind of pose, and that wasn't right. So I wondered...could I add a handle somehow? I thought of making a "stopper" piece that would slide into the head cavity when the head was removed, which would be able to add a removable handle to the bottom of the head for headless, one-handed carrying. The way I decided to do this was to destroy a G3 cup with a finger loop so I could cut the plastic out and just have the loop as a fragment to attach to an adapter. This loop fragment, I glued to the bottom of a button which fit perfectly inside the inset portion of Bloodgood's head socket without popping inside the actual head. Because the head is so heavy it would tumble off the button, I also glued a whittled-down dowel to the other side of the button as a stabilizer that would keep the adapter in place. The rod is so messily carved because I needed to reduce friction of the rod inside the head. I didn't want to break any of the glue bonds every time I tried pulling the adapter out. Here's the finished piece and how it fits. It pops in and out easily with no risk of popping into the head cavity, nor of breaking in the extraction.
The adapter also easily rotates in its position so Bloodgood's head can be turned while the loop is around one of her fingers.
With the adapter in place and some tightened joints, Bloodgood can hold her head much easier, and achieve poses that were categorically impossible for her in factory state. I wanted so badly to present her like this before, and it was out of the question then. What a huge difference it makes for her to be able to do this!
You make a Headless Horseman doll; you make her able to flaunt it, Mattel! Honestly.
Playmobil has an active Monster High license now (based on G1), and I really ought to talk about that sometime, but even their Bloodgood is designed with a head that can be carried on a handle when detached!
 |
| See the circular inset on the box photo (above). She seems to debut a new Playmobil figure head mold/attachment, because a Fi?ures head removed doesn't have a peg that Playmobil hands can grasp, and this isn't the ball-jointed neck adapter for creature or skull heads either. |
My adapter system is not flawless because the loop is not tight around G1 fingers, but I must stress again that the poses shown in these preceding photos are impossible for the doll as she was produced by Mattel.
The tightened joints also make two-handed poses a breeze. Before, when posed this way, the doll would dump the head to the floor if you breathed on her wrong.
It was not difficult at all to stage the shoot I've dreamed of for ages. I just put her by my creepiest trees, in front of my sky board to map out the background replacement, and then I manually erased the area I needed and replaced it with an excellent spooky-moon photo shot by my mom. Fog effects added last!
And of course, you might have already seen her silhouette put to use as Shorty's shadow puppet.
Now that I added this head-handle adapter peg to Bloodgood's kit, however, she needed a place to store it when her head is on her shoulders.
I decided strapping G3 Clawd's gym bag, sans paw charm, around the saddle belt before it buckled, was a good solution. The bag is vinyl with a slit open at the top that is pretty easy to squeeze wider so the adapter stake can pop in and out.
I immediately realized undoing and redoing the saddle every time I wanted to get into the bag was going to be a problem...and just as quickly also realized I could just put the far handle through the saddle and leave the near one loose so I could open the bag while it was strapped to Nightmare.
My other idea was to give her a pumpkin head option for days when her regular head is busy...but I gave this up due to a dearth of vinyl pumpkins in the right scale. They simply don't seem possible to find! Anything other than vinyl like a doll head would likely be hard to make functional on the neck peg and prevent it from being damaged.
Next, I staged Bloodgood's office as best I could with the materials I had. I set up a little stand for her head to sit on, opposite one with the Skullette sculpture (the head of Ghouls Rule Draculaura's accessory).
After these photos, the abysmal coat closure was grating on me more and more. The velcro was very weak and even after the suspenders, I felt like it was gapping open too high above her trouser line. I tore the velcro out and sewed in a plastic snap instead--the one that tore off the Effanbee Tin Man's hood for being stronger than the thread! In Bloodgood's case, I tried to sew in the snaps pretty diligently so there wasn't a risk of the thread breaking before the pieces separated.
I was lucky that the placement of the snap was good and the coat does close much better over the shirt now. It still needs to lay just right, but it's an improvement. A black elastic single-knot belt around the waist was the final assurance.
Because the thread doesn't match the coat right, I got a patch that needed disguising.
For this, I cut the head off a gold nail to serve as a third button between the two placed by the factory, gluing over the sewn patch to hide most of the darker thread.
To re-address her terribly messy hair, I untied the back and brushed some fabric glue over the top to set it before re-tying the loose section that formed the bun shape, since handling was loosening a lot of the hair.
I also got the idea to try adding the studded spiked accents around animated Bloodgood's shoulders.
The doll just has black ribbon bands sewn in this area. I cut off the straps of the G3 signature v2 Frankie backpack I wasn't using and glued them into loops. To hold them in position where they're meant to be, I glued a black elastic strip around each loop so they can't fall down the arms.
I also noticed the buttons on Bloodgood's pink cuffs. Well...
The buttons are so simple that Mattel easily could have done them on the cuffs.
I also went on a detour that undid all of my progress with the elbow joints. A downside of using glue to tighten the joints appears to be that the glue wears away and loses friction after curing and moving the joints around, and trying to add more glue got the elbow pegs stuck inside the sockets and stretched to uselessness when extracted. I had to remove both of the factory elbow hinges from the forearms, steal some hinges from another doll to have functional pegs, and shove thicker nails through the elbows to serve as new anchor pins that provided some friction. Thank goodness this doll is never meant to appear with bare arms, because now she can't afford to. She's a long way from factory state now.
I've thought about other costumes Bloodgood might wear, and I think she's begging for a dress in precisely this style:
Only problem is, the dress here is not specifically offered for G1 dolls in big-sister size, so the fit might be unviable for Bloodgood. I think she could rock the red okay, and the style of the dress feels like her home attire. The tight neck would also be great around her neck "bone". I decided not to take the risk on this, but it looks nice, and, if it fit her body, it would be wearable with Bloodgood's nailpin elbows thanks to the long sleeves.
With these further changes made, I had to take one more portrait--an old-style one like might be painted for the founder of such a historic institution.
While this speaks best to Bloodgood as a character and the work I did for her, I left the moonlit ride as the cover photo because that demonstrates the doll achieving her monster legacy in a way she never could before.
Is Bloodgood a good doll after all of this?
...no. She wasn't made properly. The coat turned out over time (and possibly when new) to be one of the shoddiest G1 clothing pieces, and the doll was completely unequipped to carry her head. Even I wasn't able to perfect this with modifications. Tightening the pegs with glue worked until it loosened again, and then broke her factory pegs. Replacing her pegs with another doll's and new pins made of nails restored her articulation and gave her elbow hinges more friction than factory state, but still not enough to never collapse under her head's weight. I have become more negative toward this doll, inasmuch as she's a failure to do justice to the character, while I also have to accept that for now, this doll is not likely to have the perfect capable joints she needs. Compared to her factory state, however, her touchy, still-limited capabilities are astronomical improvements. I'm pleased with myself for engineering the head-insert hand adapter, however fiddly that too may be, and adding costume touches like the cuff buttons and shoulder spikes improved the doll, as did the cartoon-accurate eye color repaint. I think Bloodgood is a G1 doll who desperately needs a polished remake (maybe with an articulated Nightmare and a base her hooves can connect to for different stable poses!), but that'll never happen, and it's almost definite that the doll body from Mattel today would be no better for poses with her gimmick. Realistically, a remade doll might have a better coat, and even then, I can't expect that. MGA might make the coat Bloodgood needs, but not current Mattel. And Mattel wouldn't give her an adapter handle to hold the head, either.
I'm still open to a G3 Bloodgood doll, too. I don't know if a G3 body's joints would be any better at holding a head, but the character design exists and is more in line with doll characters' than G1 Bloodgood (who was not designed as a doll first). Knowing now that G3 dolls have gotten much better than their cartoon designs (like Nefera and Skelita), a G3 Bloodgood doll could be awesome. Maybe Mattel would only bank on selling her through a playset or something, though.
I like this character a lot and I'm glad she got to a better place, but it's a very messy better place without reaching perfection. Then again, if anybody is here to preach love and acceptance of one's flaws and limitations, it's the founder of Monster High. I'll take that to heart.
No comments:
Post a Comment